All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Perl vs. Python. 2 interpreted languages, whose purpose is to prevent you from writing C/C++ code. Programmers have argued for years on which is better, and many fanboys have been seen swearing at each other for no real reason. I'm here to say which is (IMHO) the better. To discover that, we must first see what those languages are meant to do for the average programmer.

C and C++ are undoubtedly the best programming languages out there in terms of speed, power, size of community, portability and usefulness. However, over the years it became clear what was the problem with them. In the many articles I have read, C++programmers hate 2 things about their language of choice (mostly):1)Having to write their own memory management.2)The lack of readability.Interpreted languages deal with both issues and that's why they're famous. It's much easier for the average programmer to write a random, not speed-requiring application with them.Personally, I don't know C++, but I will someday for sure.

I have also read many articles conserning Perl, most writers found that it is very hard to write large applications (1000+ lines) with Perl. That's because of Perl's 'crazy' philosophy on doing things as they say. Now, I don't Perl either, but I DO have noticed its philosophy is strange. That's not the main problem for me, however.

What I have found irritating about Perl is its TOTAL LACK OF READABILITY. The winner of obfuscated C contest can surely write a more readable C program that a normal Perl programmer can write in Perl. If you want proof, look at this:

my $msg = " spacey string ";$msg =~ s/^\s+//;$msg =~ s/\s+$//;

Its purpose is to remove the spaces from the left and right of the string. Forgeting what the program's purpose is, forgeting even in what language it is writen in, what do you see? I see a totally random series of symbols, as if a kid was writing something in 1337. It reminds of an anonymous enterance in Obfuscated C Contest that used '-'-'-' to write zero and '/'/'/' to write one, but even that is more readable than THIS MONSTER I have before me.

I seriously think that Perl is overrated.

Next time I'm gonna check on Ruby. I have heard a lot of great stuff about it, so my expectations are high:).

I posted a more welcoming comment, posting equivalent code in C and pointing out that the Perl code was much easier to read, once you understood it, and that brain cycles were better spent working on the programming problem than the specifics of how to remove spaces from a string. I invited him to look into Perl some more before writing it off.
I was hoping it might do some good.